New Book Coming, Trip to Stockholm Coming Sooner

The book, Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration (Packt Publishing, 2011) was conceived by BizTalk MVP Kent Weare and somehow he suckered me into writing a few chapters. Actually, the reason that I keep writing books is because it offers me a great way to really dig into a technology and try to uncover new things. In this book, I’ve contributed chapters about integrating with the following technologies:

Windows Azure AppFabric. In this chapter I talk about how to integrate BizTalk with Windows Azure AppFabric and show a number of demos related to securely receiving and sending messages.

Salesforce.com. Here I looked at how to both send to, and receive data from the software-as-a-service CRM leader. I’ve got a couple of really fun demos here that show things that no one else has tried yet. That either makes me creative or insane. Probably both.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This chapter shows how to create and query records in Dynamics CRM and explains one way of pushing data from Dynamics CRM to BizTalk Server.

In next week’s trip with Kent to Stockholm, we will cover a number of product-neutral tips for integrating with Line of Business systems. I’ve baked up a few new demos with the above mentioned technologies in order to talk about strategies and options for integration.

As an aside, I think I’m done with writing books for a while. I’ve enjoyed the process, but in this ever-changing field of technology it’s so difficult to remain relevant when writing over a 12 month period. Instead, I’ve found that I can be more timely by publishing training for Pluralsight, writing for InfoQ.com and keeping up with this blog. I hope to see some of you next week in Stockholm and look forward to your feedback on the new book.